


Things That Keep Me Alive, Keep Me Alone

by wanderingrebel



Category: BBC Sherlock, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Fleeting mention of cocaine, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, Sherlock's Past, Sherlock's p.o.v, Sherlock's version of angst, Sherlock's version of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1262533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingrebel/pseuds/wanderingrebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John makes Sherlock disoriented with yearning. He is the galaxy Sherlock is luminous in, ablaze with anguish and craving, setting fire to himself from within.<br/>(Sherlock's version of fluff and angst).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things That Keep Me Alive, Keep Me Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my best friend - happy birthday, M! <3

Sherlock is a stranger to his own heart, eluding it, barring it and whittling sentiment to dormancy.  
The strangled gasp whenever John beams at him, exuberant like sunlight sifting through the tapestry in the afternoon, the spastic thrums when John rambles into the kitchen in the morning, amber glow skimming his weathered skin, the hitch in its rhythm as John cards his hands through his wind-mussed hair in agitation – Sherlock cannot fathom this inexorable magnetism of John.

*

Dusk wreathes across the vista, in subtle tones of mauve, vermilion and gold. The faint echo of the day ricochets across the sky in synchronization with John’s chuckles. The cadence of his laughter reverberates in Sherlock’s chest long after it has elapsed into comfortable silence, setting his insides ablaze with yearning.

* * *

 

Sherlock’s workspace, which essentially is each nook and cranny of 221B, is cluttered with the debris of his bee larvae experiment and a deluge of papers covered in hasty scribbles.  
He spares a cursory glance at the telly, which John is watching with rapt attention.  
“It’s not right, who is that?” Sherlock pierces John’s absorption.  
“The Doctor,” he answers absent-mindedly, not looking up from the screen.  
“That cannot be right,” Sherlock glowers, sauntering to John. “The Doctor is the eccentric man with chiseled cheekbones and defined jaw-line,” he states disparagingly. “Honestly, John, how can you not know that?”  
For an evanescent moment, the house is utterly still.  Then John blinks incredulously and lapses into uncontrollable laughter – peals of unbridled giggles exuding from his quirked lips and his eyes water with mirth. “You,” John gasps, his mouth arched with astonishment, “Sherlock Holmes, are a Whovian.” He beams as Sherlock’s cheeks flush and he pouts belligerently.  
“Absolutely not.”  
“Yes, you are a rabid fan, Sherlock.”  
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sherlock rolls his eyes before his laughter fuses with John’s.

*

When Sherlock cannot find his way back, John, like the Polaris – unwavering, steadfast, dependable and iridescent with a familiar petulance, steers him through winding alleys of his mind and guides him home.  
John is a lifeboat, cradling Sherlock to the shore when he is stranded within his brain akin to a flashflood.  
Sherlock has a consumptive desire to trace the laughter lines running down John’s face, the branches on his palm and his veins meandering into his tanned skin like merging streams, like a map that doesn’t let him get lost. John holds Sherlock, tethers him and keeps him. Sherlock wants to let his whole life pass by being held in John’s firm yet tender hands.

* * *

 

Rain whips against the windows, striking an eerie chord with Sherlock’s thundering mind. He is trapped within it like a prisoner, burning himself down to the core, unable to escape the labyrinth of thoughts that are ripping his sanity apart, tendon by tendon.  
John unlocks the door, steadying himself on the balustrade, drenched and shivering.  
He glances at Sherlock, lying listlessly on the settee, and asks, “Sherlock, are you alright?”  
“You’re soaked,” Sherlock points out, sulkily.  
“Brilliantly deduced,” John gives a dry chuckle as he strides to Sherlock, sprawled in a saturnine manner and leans in.  
“John, you ought to dry yourself.”  
“You ought to make me a cup of tea and make a fuss over how terribly soaked I am and how I’m going to get pneumonia,” John smiles gently, holding Sherlock’s gaze, “but I’m not going to live long enough to see you be, well, domestic, so you sit up and _I’ll_ make us both a cup of tea.”

*

Sherlock careens through his cavernous mind, rummaging for clues to decipher the riddles John is written in. He is dizzy with the mystery of John, intoxicated with him, breathless by the unsolvable conundrum John in. Slivers of John twine in and drape themselves along the jagged summits, obdurate, even in Sherlock’s tempestuous head.

*

Only John can shatter the screen of indifference and disdain that Sherlock masquerades vulnerability and hope behind. Sherlock’s heart is tangled with John’s, intricately and inextricably, knotted with the silken threads of skipped charades, surges of craving, tumbling and staggering revelations and being each other’s antidote.

* * *

 

“Sebastian,” John’s voice is soft and hesitant and he looks at Sherlock expectantly.  
The sepulchral howls of wind muffle the incessant drone of the city and John and Sherlock are encompassed in silence, only alive to each other’s heaves and whispers.  
Clearing his throat, Sherlock says, “Sebastian and Victor were inseparable whilst we were in University. When Victor and I were together, they drifted apart and Sebastian blamed me for destroying Victor when it ended, horrifically.” He gestures with his hands, watching the fire cackle.  
John inhales sharply. “Did you love Victor?” He ventures, his whisper caresses Sherlock gently.  
For a minute, Sherlock feels he is twenty again – with a mass of tumbling, windswept curls, dithering ruminations, scrawny yet agile body and an open heart.  
Untying the knot, drawn tightly between Victor and him had taught him to fortify his emotions, to observe the weakness in trusting and that time healed bleeding wounds to faint scars that could never be erased.  
Not the way I love you, Sherlock wants to say, but he only shakes his head.

*

Cocaine was electricity across damp skin, an arrow through an aching heart, a shard of glass beneath bare feet. And John is an inextinguishable ember of hope, the flicker of a smile on a tear-stained face, laughter perforating ominous silence.  
John is like a shadow undulating with light – vacillating and enchanting, and Sherlock cannot explain how excruciatingly intrigued by this incomprehension he is.

* * *

 

The earth is damp beneath the staccato taps of their feet as they wait, for an excruciating length of time at a crime scene.  
John shuffles, heaving, “Tell me something that no one knows about you,” he says to Sherlock, his eyes blown wide.  
“I was an addict,” Sherlock rolls the word in his mouth in distaste.  
“Yes, drugs bust,” John murmurs.  
“Cocaine,” Sherlock answers the question that hasn’t quite formed on John’s tongue.  
“Why?”  
“The world tilted beneath my plunge and I knew I wouldn’t fall.”

 

*

John is like a black-hole Sherlock would not mind being sucked into, he is like the bottomless ocean – profound and mystifying that Sherlock wants, desperately, to explore, like a book on criminology Sherlock wants to delve into. With John, Sherlock is insatiable. Sherlock wants, ceaselessly, more, Sherlock cannot get enough.

* * *

 

John slumps on the sofa, “Oh, God.”  
“John?” Sherlock echoes, perching himself next to John.  
“It’s not alright, Sherlock! Moriarty’s playing an evil game with you, they all think you’re –“  
“The villain, I know,” Sherlock cut in. “I know, John.”  
“What are you going to do about that? Everyone’s doubting you.”  
“Do you doubt me?” Sherlock enquires.  
“Of course I don’t!”  
“Then it does not matter.”  
“But they think you’re a fraud – “  
“As long as you don’t doubt me, it’s all fine, John.”  
“Bloody hell,” John exhales and cards his hand through his damp hair.  
“John,” Sherlock begins, his opalescent eyes hued by the dimly lit room.  
“Jesus, Sherlock, you cannot deceive me.”  
“I’m not beguiling you-“  
“Oh, for God’s sake, Sherlock,” John almost shouts, “look at yourself – you’re petrified. Don’t pretend you’re not because your façade is transparent.”  
Sherlock arches his brow, “And I suppose you are cognizant of every expression of mine and its connotation,” he asks, sharply.  
“No, but I can tell when you’re lying.”  
The intensity of John’s perusal is electrifying, jolting through Sherlock’s body like a swig of whiskey, scorching him.  
 Sherlock perches himself beside John, cradling his head in his hands.  
“I’m not petrified,” he sighs, “Moriarty is, um.”  
“He’s a downright prick?” John tries.  
A faint grin dances along the arc of Sherlock’s lips as he looks up to watch John in amazement.  
John is case with unfathomable clues that leave him breathless with perplexity and desperate to unearth more. Just when Sherlock thinks he’s unraveled the abstruseness of John, he does something so baffling that Sherlock’s deductions become foggy at the edges and he has to begin all over again.

 

*

Sherlock is no wordsmith; acerbic observations fall out, brusquely, from his throat. John makes him want to know poetry, to enunciate the maelstrom of emotions that whirl within him, to bead a rosary of mumbles and ramblings.  
How can Sherlock speak of how drunk he is on the ache of craving, of the desperation swelling inside him to discover only what exhaustion can coax out of John, to divulge all that he hasn’t had the courage to utter onto John’s mouth?  
Sherlock and John aren’t a balanced brew, not a saccharine lyric about love, not calming tea after an ordeal – they’re a chemical explosion, the racket of life and bitter coffee after an adrenaline rush.

* * *

 

 Snow cascades thickly, blanketing the filthy streets. Sherlock halts his violin sonata with an incensed screech of its strings.   
“I know you believe yourself to be omnipotent, but you can’t change the weather, Sherlock,” John grins at Sherlock’s petulant moue.   
Sherlock sighs in reply, resigned. 

The hush is enough.

*

John, Sherlock thinks, is his soul, inundated by love that knows no bounds or command, with love that cannot be articulated with the meager sentence, “I love you.”  
John is the mystery Sherlock wants to spend his entire life solving, and loving John is the secret Sherlock will have to hold in his heart

 


End file.
